I realized i hadn't finalized the artwork for the dry transfers. That has now been taken care off. The only graphics we know off on the APC exterior, are off course the "2D SULACO" and the "542/6MTS" on the nose, above the headlights. It has been completely redrawn in AutoCAD and CorelDraw (with a bit of Gimp in between), not using any existing off-the-shelf fonts.

Pictured below is a print of the digital artwork that has been send to the supplier. I printed it on normal crappy paper, so the letters bled a bit, not as sharp as the digital artwork. The final drytransfers will be very very sharp, and silkscreened in white.

Btw, the lines above and below the lettering are positioning markers on the APC nose. So no measuring, or fooling around to get it straight. Sort of a plug and play thing.

I scored a large batch of carbon laminate, that i'll incorporate into the APC's, that i'll pick up either late this week or early next week.

In the meantime i'm rounding off the to-do list.

One item that has hardly been documented, hardly seen on screen or off, is the spotlight on the roof of the APC. Together with Harry Harris, we found the exact type of spotlight that was used, and i have that now modelled. First in 3d, in Rhino with VRay.

Interestingly, the spotlight is not on the APC, when it enters the great entrance scene in the Sulaco bay. The frame is there, but no spotlight.

It is seen only in the Acton shoot, for the Alien hive scenes. Most online pictures that show the APC (behind the scenes), show the APC rear exiting the Acton power plant, after filming the hive crash scene. For protection during the crash scenes, a halfround cover was added over the spot. After all, the spot was rented for the production.

The miniature SFX APC's therefore did not have this halfround cover. It was only there on the full-size APC to protect the spot. Even the Halcyon kit doesn't (which is the closest rendition of the vehicle to come to market, apart from it's obvious flaws), and it used more studio references than simply a blueprint or the movie itself. It has details that can not be taken from either.

Anyho, my 2 cents.

Below is the 3d rendering. It's not a big part, so therefore the walls had to be beefed up with a few 0.1mm's.

With regards to the light I'm a lighting technician so I guess finding the right one was going to happen at some point, I'm just really happy that it happened when it did. As someone on another forum said "it's the little things that make all the difference" and even though you never really see this part it's a testament to Wasili's passion for accuracy that he's included it.

Wasili it's been an honour to help you out with this amazing kit, I'm really excited to see the final result.

Here's the cooling fins on top of the spotlight (as seen on the render posted above), now cnc machined from styrene. The fins all have a tapered profile (they are thicker at the bottom than on the top of the fin), but can hardly be seen in this pic.

Thanx Bwood and Joberg. As the cover is only seen in those pics, i believe it is not part of the design, and therefore not included in my APC kit.

Here's todays update.

Machined some more pieces that make up the side details for the spotlight. They're still on the cnc bed (see pic), so a bit dusty.

And also did the front mesh/grille/whatsitcalled that funnels the light at the end of the cone. It's machined from 2mm styrene, and i'm not going to bother with casting these. All of them will be machined. I hate cleaning/sanding blobs of excess resin, especially with fragile parts.

Only thing left on the spotlight is the tapered tube that makes up the front half.

I have a few long days ahead for a productpresentation, so next update is next week tuesday.

Was a good week. As mentioned last week i picked up a large batch of carbon fibre leftovers. Today i got a fresh new batch, on the roll, of some 25m2 412grams biax carbonfibre cloth, ready to use on the hulls. It does help to work in composites

I also scored an old oven for 5 euro, for postcuring all the epoxy/carbon parts besides the hull. No pissing off the misses here, by using the one in the kitchen.

And yesterday i talked to Hornsby, better known as the owners of Humbrol, regarding a future reissue of #170. No luck there, even though they do consider requests into their future offerings. So everybody, mail Humbrol that you want 170....badly.... I did ask whether they make custom batches of say, 1000 tins, but no luck there either.....

Anyway....

I've been building a new jacket mold for the new silicone hull mold. I usually build mine from mdf. Sure, there's plenty of different ways to do this, but the straight lines of the APC make this my preferred method.

I came up with a two parter jacket. One part slots in the other, locking each other out. It only needs a few screws to keep it all from falling apart.

There's a few advantages to this, as the thickness of the silicone will be very consistent (it's 10mm all round, except for some of the corners), saving a lot of material. I've added an extra rim on the top of the box, locking the edges of the silicone in place, preventing the rubber 'walls' from falling in while i work on the epoxy and laminate. And locking the mold perfectly in the jacket.

Yeah, i know it's a bit of a lame update, but this still took a few days to figure out, and put together.

Just a few more days of push-to-shove work commitments and then i'm off for a short while to work on this.

In the meantime here's some for you to look at.

Probably the only advantage to being slow is that you see how your product holds up over the long run. In summer 2010 i cast the rear sections in a certain pu resin, and was shocked to see they were warped a year later. They were not stacked, and stored perfectly flat.

I'm still discussing this with the supplier, this resin apparently keeps shrinking slightly on the long run. The above pic shows the etched mesh squashed and deformed.

One other part was cast with this resin at the time, and that was the gunsled. I checked and it was the same crap. Those have been cast again in the regular resin, and hold up perfectly. The rear sections were a different story.

I integrated that into the hull. I machined new parts, took out the rear of the master, and started adding the new assemblies.

And completed.

Next thing up was to close the hull again so the silicone would be kept to a minimum, so i added a styrene skirt. Again machined parts so the alignment of the epoxy hull and the styrene frames (of the final product) would not be in doubt.

Here's some of them.

The skirt leaves a minimum 2mm overhang, more where necessary.

Added some positioning markers (squares in the middle) to the skirt so they aligned with the hull.

And finished....
The three strips going over the top, position the hull master perfectly in the middle of the mold jacket. Next to being glued, most seams of the skirt were taped over, and tiny holes filled with chavant clay.

As the hull master is not solid, and slightly larger than my vac chamber, i had to make sure there were no bubbles in the final mold.

I put the hull on a chair, and taped it in place. After degassing a small batch of silicone, i poured some in places that might lock airbubbles.

And repeated that 4 times till all sides were covered, every time waiting an hour till the silicone set. On hindsight i should have kept the three strips on the bottom off till the last moment.

I gently lowered the hull into the moldjacket, which had been greased up with releaseagent. As the hull was a bit on the heavy side, i added two simple rings from metalwire.

Filled the mold in batches of 4 - 600grams, so as not to waste any silicone. After each pour, i would write down the weight of the batch, for future reference. The silicone can set in between pours, so the overall pressure on the walls of the model is not too high. We don't want any breaking seams.

Btw, i use Zhermack A22 silicone. Love the stuff.

Once set, the screws were taken out of the jacket, and gently pried open on each side. This is always the scariest moment for me. "Did i forget something that will screw up my mold, the moldjacket or my model".

Everything went very smooth, the jacket opened up perfectly, due to well greased mdf ( i use petroleum jelly). Subsequently i took out the silicone mold, cleaned up the edges. Trimmed them a bit were necessary.

Hey, what you lookin 'at, girl ?

Took out the model, being careful not to accidentally smear some petroleum jelly on the business side of the mold. And placed it back in the assembled jacket.

Lookin' good overall. Only found one small airbubble, albeit in a place i didn't expect. Could have been much worse, so was quite happy with the result.

Well, maybe a bit. As i'm using 400gr/m2 biax carbonfibre, it's good to precut the fibre pieces. You cannot pull them apart and add on the spot, there's a different manual for this stuff.

I made paper templates by using the master, and although i changed them progressivley based on working with the mold, they were a good start.

All the paper templates.

Start cutting carbon with the templates. The roll is 130cm wide, and unfortunately there's only one table in the house suitable for that.

One set done. Most pieces are three layers of carbon.

A few hulls on the table, next to the master. The epoxy resin is pretinted medium grey (-ish), but since the fibre is black, it will tend to show through in places. The insides look not as nice as ones done with fibreglass, which due to it's transparancy fades away in the tinted epoxy. The black carbon simply contrasts, unless i tinted the epoxy black, which i did with a few.

Besides a few airbubbles on corners, overall the hulls come out nice.

Top front.

The front corner has been detailed like the full size APC, which had an interchangeable cornerpiece, to show a completely dented corner (for Acton shoot/ Plant corridor escape scenes), or the undented corner (shot later at Pinewood / Sulaco hangar, APC introduction). You can see the weld beads and bolt holes on the hulls.

A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. Just wow How much resin goes into those babies? Very, very eager to see one APC completed and painted.
Difficult to see the real scale...would it be possible to do the "coke-can test" with a pic?